Government scientists warn of California ‘superstorms’

If climate change isn’t on your radar yet, perhaps a massive ‘superstorm’ dumping as much as 10 feet of rain across California would put it there.

NASA

USGS scientists unveiled a scenario that would cause such a storm at a conference last week, noting that the damage a ‘superstorm’ would cause would dwarf that caused by a large earthquake by a factor of five. A quarter of all homes in the state would likely experience flooding.

The scenario supposed that two historic storms — of January 1969 and February 1986 — occurred “back to back in a scientifically plausible way,” explained USGS scientist Lucy Jones, stressing that “the model is not an extremely extreme event.”

Even a single historical storm, occurring in the winter of 1861-62, dumped enough rain to inundate a 300-by-20-mile-wide stretch of the Central Valley and to create lakes in the Mojave Desert. It rained for 45 days — more than the Biblical flood Noah faced.

As the planet’s average temperatures rise, the atmosphere stores more energy, making such dramatic events increasingly plausible.